


Sweet Dreams

by icespyders



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-25
Updated: 2013-02-25
Packaged: 2017-12-03 13:51:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/698946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icespyders/pseuds/icespyders
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"You’re vaguely reflected in the shiny surface of the sendificator, and a shiver runs down your spine. Tentatively you poke at your neck and feel the skin and muscle and veins holding your head to the rest of you, as though in a trance. Your brain’s flatlining, you can barely think straight, all that’s on your mind is how much you never fully appreciated having your head firmly attached to your body."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sweet Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> "It isn't a microwave. It's your SENDIFICATOR! Pretty much the only Crockertech you can bring yourself to use. It's just too handy not to. You just type the coordinates, pop in the thing you want to sendificate, and hit the button. It'll sendificate that thing in a jiffy, assuming it's temporally allowed, and within size restrictions. Obviously you can only send what you can fit inside there. You had to send Jake your brobot piece by piece, barely managing to squeeze that shiny melon head in there." Yeah, just so we're clear, Dirk sticking his head in the sendificator in "Synchronize" was an even more unpleasant experience than originally thought. The mental image of Dirk really jamming his poor head in that thing stuck with me until I wrote this. Enjoy.

Your name is Dirk Strider and everything’s going according to plan.

That is, if by “according to plan” you mean that you’re just desperately praying this absurd gambit works out. Honestly, it’s shocking how quickly your situation turned into literal life-or-death.

As far as you know two of your friends are dead, the third is AWOL, and there’s only you left to juggle all their fates and play the hero. Meaning that if everything comes crashing down, it’s all on you, and the pressure of that knowledge is giving you a migraine. You set yourself up as this all-knowing coolguy but you know you’re not. You just happen to be the guy with the plan. At least thus far it’s working.

You ditched your apartment after setting up the totem with Sawtooth and filling your pockets with all the other stuff you’ll need, and then traveled through one of Roxy’s fenestrated planes which inexplicably ended up in your room a while ago. You still don’t know how the hell that happened and it’s fairly disquieting how convenient the situation was, but you don’t have time to scrutinize the bizarre coincidence. You’re now standing in her room next to her dead body after performing the necessary corpsesmooch. She ought to be awake on Derse right now, so you guess she counts as alive again. Not like being awake on Derse is a major improvement, though. Derse’s shit is utterly wrecked, and it’s not even your fault this time. Fucking Red Miles.

Being in the room with Roxy’s corpse is extremely depressing, even though you’re sure she’s awake again. Even worse, every time you close your eyes you just see Jane getting stabbed by whatever the fuck those Miles are made of and guilt kicks at you with more and more force. Why couldn’t you get her out of there in time? She didn’t deserve that. It’s your fucking job to keep your friends safe and you failed horribly. Jane’s still precariously dangling between life and death as you stand here uselessly.

With another pang in your gut you remember you have no idea what happened to Jake. Last you saw you had Lil’ Seb get him the hell out, but who knows what could have happened to him since then? Everything seems to be falling to shit at the moment. It wouldn’t be crazy to assume some harm befell him too. If he’s out of commission, this whole thing’s about to come crashing down.

You shake your head as though trying to empty out those thoughts from your brain. Focus. You’ve got to wake up your dreamself and fast before any more ruin befalls your friends. Getting to Roxy’s was really only the first phase of this whole gambit roulette wheel, unfortunately.

But you really don’t want to think about this next step.

You go over your objectives in your head one more time, just to make sure you know the whole list by heart. Wake up your dreamself, wake up Jane with another corpsesmooch once you’re back on Derse, get yourself and Roxy the fuck out of dodge, pick up Jane along the way, teleport to Jake’s, and get in the game. Everybody’s alive and happy. No problem. You can handle this.

You pop the sendificator out of your sylladex and a heavy weight drops in your stomach.

You’re not so sure that you can handle this.

It’s an enormous, ostentatiously bright red box. Looks like a microwave without a door, all marked up with Batterwitch propaganda logos. You always felt uncomfortable having it around, but now the damn thing’s almost leering at you. It’s undeniably menacing. It holds all the weight of what you’re about to do.

You’re about to kill yourself.

Behead yourself, to be more specific. The sendificator will be your guillotine because your severed head has business elsewhere, years in the past and miles across the sea. You’re sending it to Jake, glasses attached so your Auto-Responder can walk him through his part of the plan. Simply put, Jake’s got to corpsesmooch you so your dreamself on Derse will wake up, enabling you to follow through on all your objectives. You’re no use to anyone either here in Roxy’s house or out cold on Derse. It has to be done.

You wince nonetheless. Usually people send would-be paramours bouquets or something, not a fucking head. You probably should have tried to prepare Jake for this.

You’re vaguely reflected in the shiny surface of the sendificator, and a shiver runs down your spine. Tentatively you poke at your neck and feel the skin and muscle and veins holding your head to the rest of you, as though in a trance. Your brain’s flatlining, you can barely think straight, all that’s on your mind is how much you never fully appreciated having your head firmly attached to your body.

Part of you is berating and harsh, reminding you that you don’t have time to dick around and be scared, that your friends need you, that you have to be strong. The other part of you is shamelessly terrified and nauseous to boot. Your hands are shaking and you curse yourself under your breath. No time. No excuses. Just fucking do it. They need you, you have to do it.

You flip the box and start to lower it over your skull, feeling it press down on your hair.

Everything starts to go in slow motion. You feel your breath catch in your chest; suddenly your lungs are a countdown clock, marking your last moments with every repetition of inhale, exhale. Your mouth is dry and heavy and tastes like bile, and your brain is screaming at you to stop, stop, stop, to live and keep living, to breathe and keep breathing, desperately trying to save you from this self-orchestrated death you’re inducing.

You remember reading once that in a panic scenario, when you think you’re going to die, your brain perceives time more slowly, so you feel like you have more time to think up an escape route or dream up some way to keep yourself from dying. Even when you know you’re going to be safe and everything’s going to be okay ( _I’m gonna be safe, everything’ll be okay, just breathe, it’ll be okay…)_ your brain still freezes to help you survive.

You wish it wouldn’t. You need time to go more quickly, you need to stop thinking and re-thinking and overthinking, you need it to be over, you need to wake up on Derse and spring back into action.

Suddenly it strikes you how ridiculous this whole plan is. Right now everything is hinging on your severed head making it safely to Jake, on Jake being awake and alive and able, and on him actually recovering from the shock of waking up with your noggin in his lap and going through with your plan and kissing you. Corpsesmooching you. It’s not even gonna _be_ you, just your goddamn head. It’s a lot to drop on someone, especially a wild card like Jake. You don’t know how he’ll react, you don’t know what he’ll do. Can you really rely on him? All your life you’ve gotten by on your own, never needed to rely on anyone, really. Now suddenly your life, literally your life, is hinging on someone else. You’re throwing your continued existence out into the ether and letting it fly out of your control -- how? Surely there’s another way to make this work, isn’t there?

 _No_ , you answer yourself with surprising surety. _I trust him. He’ll do it._

And you actually believe it. You genuinely think he’ll pull through.

You don’t know if that’s good or bad. It’s so harsh but rational to trust no one but yourself, and yet here you are, letting your life (and your skull) rest in someone else’s hands. Isn’t that foolish? But on the flip side, shouldn’t you trust your friends? You honestly don’t know.

As much as you love picking apart your fractured psyche, you don’t have the luxury of going all philosophical at the moment. You’ve got shit to do.

Your head is jammed into the box. It’s an uncomfortable, cramped fit; you have to shove it into place so it slips past your chin. Your labored breathing fills the tiny space and echoes in your ears. You’re sweating, you’re shaking, all you can see is red. There’s no more coherent thought, just the constant grim mantra of _I’m dying, I’m about to die, I’m going to die._ There’s some sort of droning in your head drowning out any other sentiment. It seems all-too real and yet not real enough simultaneously. You slide your eyes shut and wait for it to be over.

At the last minute you remember the old myth of beheaded people retaining consciousness for an instant after getting their heads lobbed off.

A moment later you learn it’s true.

It’s a sudden, sharp pain across your entire neck; abruptly your veins and capillaries burst and blood soaks through the collar of your shirt and splatters across your shoulders. You feel your arms spasm and your fingers clench from the shock. Your eyes fly open again and your face freezes in a stunned cringe, mouth dangling open in a little shocked O-shape. Your nose is filled with a bitingly metallic smell, and the tiniest, most suffocated cry escapes your lips. Then it’s all dark. You don’t even feel your body collapse and hit the floor in Roxy’s room and you’re not conscious for the sendificator-enabled journey to Jake’s island. The last thing you feel is the peculiar heaviness of the blood on your clothes; you never really expected blood to be so weighty. The last thing you see is the red of the box, coated with little droplets of condensation from your hot breath.

The last thing you remember thinking is simply, _I trust you._


End file.
